Dr Daniela DeBono from the Department of Anthropological Sciences recently delivered a keynote lecture at the . The title of her keynote lecture was ‘Breaking the person: Humanitarianism, human rights and hospitality with newcomers in Europe’.
The international conference, which brought together mental health researchers and practitioners was chaired by Professor Angela Abela and Professor Maria Borcsa.
Dr DeBono drew on rich ethnographic material collected over the last fifteen years in Lampedusa, Malta, Sicily and Sweden in immigration detention centres, migrant reception zones in the Mediterranean and with people subjected to this form of ‘border violence’. Her approach, inspired by the anthropologist Paul Farmer, sought to “tie together the ethnographically visible with the deeper structures that generate or perpetuate poverty and inequality, and with the meanings these events and processes are given.”(Paul Farmer 2004: 323)
Dr DeBono showed how the structural elements, like the securitised approach of reception, disembarkation and detention in ‘first reception’ centres amount to violence which negatively effects the mental health of refugees. She discussed the socio-cultural and political processes upon which this system is constructed, which, despite the official terminology is not a system that is built to be hospitable but one designed to address the requirements of border control.
Refugees who arrive weary, exhausted and sometimes traumatised, have to navigate their way through an alien, bureaucratised system which is not aimed to protect or empower them. The system, in their words, ‘reduces them to a number’, controls them, confines them - ‘breaks them’, during a period in their lives when they most need care and compassion. Implementing care within this system is often an impossible task, restricted as it is within the confines of the system, and might even be counterproductive to the wellbeing/of the individual refugee.
DeBono’s analysis sheds light on how dominant social and political processes in contemporary societies such as humanitarianism, hospitality and exceptional approaches to human rights.
